A Contest as an Attempt to Revive Jewish Tradition

Source Description

This announcement from the Israelitisches
Familienblatt [Israelite Family Paper] no. 38, September 20, 1928, supplement “Aus alter und neuer Zeit” [“Times Old and New”]
no. 27, is more than just an advertisement calling for participation in a
contest by stressing the valuable prizes to be won. For it also gives the
reasons for selecting these particular prizes. The author and designer of
this contest, one of a series held by the paper, is identified only as the
“publisher and editor.” It is safe to assume that the detailed texts for
these contests were written by Leo I. Lessmann, the
paper’s publisher. They reflect his interest in
reviving Jewish tradition and spreading knowledge about Jewish religious
practice.

Leo I.
Lessmann was born in 1891 in
Altona.
After his return from the First World War, he took over the Israelitisches Familienblatt, which his father, Max Lessmann, had founded. He was an Orthodox Jew and a
member of the Neue Dammtor Synagogue’sNeue Dammtor-Synagoge
administration. Between 1926 and 1932, the Israelitisches
Familienblatt, a Jewish newspaper published in Hamburg and
distributed nationwide, offered challenging contests that were very popular.
Solving them required knowledge on Jewish culture and religion, and the
prizes consisted mostly in valuable ritual objects for domestic religious
practice as well as in paintings and books related to Jewish religion and
culture. The many prizes offered were both very desirable and precious.

Leo Lessmann’s
motives

In the text presented here, Lessmann clearly expresses his intention and goals in creating
the contests and in his selection of prizes. He voices concerns about the
decline of Jewish tradition since the granting of civic emancipation and
subsequent attempts among many Jews to become an integrated part of middle class
society. He wishes for new life or a revival of domestic Jewish ceremony and
assigns great importance to Jewish ceremonial art for the preservation of Jewish
consciousness and Jewish identity. He was worried by the fact that due to the
dissolution of rural communities in Germany, Poland, and the
USSR on the
one hand and secularized families and disinterested heirs of domestic ritual
objects on the other, many valuable and folklore objects had already been lost,
were sold on the general art market or had been acquired by Christians. The fear
that many more objects might be lost gave rise to the idea of using a contest in
order to create awareness for the issue and to inspire Jews to secure objects in
their daily environment, to collect them or donate them to existing Jewish
collections. While it seems unlikely that the winners would become collectors
themselves – a hope that is expressed in this source – the newspaper’s main goal
was to make its readers aware of the importance of preserving ritual objects in
families and synagogues and to include them in the process of preservation.

The prizes

The article illustrates and describes only a part of the prizes available in the
contest published two weeks previously. The contests were always held around the
time of Rosh Hashanah.
Participants could win a 20-day tourist visit to Palestine as first
prize; a valuable painting by an unnamed Jewish artist as second prize; and a
set of silver Jewish ritual objects (Hanukkah menorah Eight- or nine-branched candelabrum lit during the Hanukkah
holiday, kiddush cup A usually
richly ornamented cup over which wine is blessed on the Shabbat and other
Jewish holidays, besomim container A usually artfully decorated container in which aromatic spices
are kept. The spices are smelled at the end of the Shabbat in order to carry
the scent of the holiday into everyday life, etrog bowl A usually richly ornamented bowl holding
etrog, a citrus fruit, which is part of the traditional Sukkot
decoration) as third prize. The fourth prize was a gramophone with 12
Hebrew and Yiddish records; the fifth through seventh prize was a valuable
kiddush cup A usually richly ornamented cup
over which wine is blessed on the Shabbat and other Jewish holidays
and a besamim container A usually artfully
decorated container in which aromatic spices are kept. The spices are
smelled at the end of the Shabbat in order to carry the scent of the holiday
into everyday life; the eighth through 14th prize was a silver
besamim containerA usually artfully
decorated container in which aromatic spices are kept. The spices are
smelled at the end of the Shabbat in order to carry the scent of the holiday
into everyday life; the 15th through 44th prize was an artfully
illustrated Passover
HaggadahBook telling the story of the
exodus from Egypt and prescribing the order of the ceremony on the eve of
the Passover holiday. The 45th through 75th prize was a pocket watch
with a Hebrew clock face and a depiction of Moses with the Tablets of the Law on the back for men; for
women, it was a copy of the cookbook “Kochbuch für die
jüdische Küche” [“Cookbook for the Jewish Kitchen”] published by
the Jewish Women’s leagueJüdischer
Frauenbund. The selection of prizes is – as the source states –
“adapted to suit the serious character of both the novel and the challenge and –
the Jewish character of our paper.”

The challenge

The challenge, which had been conceived “with the collaboration of a whole number
of well-known Jewish and non-Jewish writers,” consisted in identifying the 12
authors of the novel “Wanderung und Heimkehr”
[“Wandering and Homecoming”]. The novel appeared in the paper in serialized
form, one chapter at a time. According to the paper, “twelve authors have
written it jointly – a chapter each – twelve authors from diverse milieus: men
and women, Germans and foreigners, even Jews and non-Jews – and yet they are all
authors whose unique style, preferred settings, types and problems are already
familiar to our readers from their frequent contributions to our paper.”Israelitisches Familienblatt No. 36, September
6, 1928, 14. Like all the paper’s contests, this one was quite
sophisticated and required knowledge of Jewish religion and tradition. In other
cases, knowledge of the Hebrew language and the Ashkenazi spelling of ritual objects and holidays
were necessary in order to solve the puzzle.

The Judaica collection of the Israelitisches
Familienblatt

Of the 75 prizes 17 were silver ceremonial objects. In subsequent years their
share in the prizes was increased significantly. This raises the question where
these objects came from. The accompanying photographs refer to Lessmann’s own collection of
Judaica. He built the most expansive and diverse collection existing in early
20th century
Germany after
several others had been dissolved. He began building his collection in 1925; by 1930 it held about 500
objects, and by 1935 there were about 1,000: menorahs, kiddush cupsA usually richly ornamented cup over which
wine is blessed on the Shabbat and other Jewish holidays, spice
containersA usually artfully decorated
container in which aromatic spices are kept. The spices are smelled at the
end of the Shabbat in order to carry the scent of the holiday into everyday
life, Passover
objects, circumcision instruments, rimmonlit. “pomegranate,” ornamental Torah finials, and lots more. He kept
his collection in a museum room in his private apartment on Hamburg’sBadestraße. The photographs
shown here were most likely taken in this room. Lessmann’s collection
contained works from Eastern
Europe, Italy, the Orient, and Germany, thus representing a diversity in the design of objects
all serving the same religious purpose yet strongly influenced by their
respective environment with regard to their form and imagery. For this reason,
he acquired both highly valuable and artfully designed objects as well as
objects representing popular culture, both traditional and modern ones. His
newspaper regularly contained adverts looking for Judaica, which he was ready to
acquire “at a high price.” However, his name never appeared in connection with
the collection or these adverts. Instead it is referred to as “The Israelitisches Familienblatt Collection of Ritual
Objects” both in articles and descriptions of individual objects.Description and photographs: Israelitisches
Familienblatt, no. 29, July 17, 1930, supplement “Aus alter und neuer Zeit“
no. 17, p. 133.

The Israelitisches Familienblatt

The title, “The Israelitisches Familienblatt
Supports Jewish Religious Art,” contains a programmatic statement that was meant
to encourage readers to put the contests in context by studying other articles
featured in this newspaper. The Israelitisches
Familienblatt was the most widely distributed and most widely read
Jewish
newspaper in Germany. It was moderately liberal, non-partisan, apolitical,
and popular due to its extensive entertainment section. It contained detailed
information about life in Jewish communities worldwide, and it portrayed Jewish
personalities. Promoting learning and education was among its main goals. It did
not get involved in the conflict between Zionism and assimilation unfolding at the time.
The paper was published in Hamburg from 1898 until 1935 and subsequently in Berlin until it was
banned in 1938. Lessman used the richly
illustrated supplement titled “Aus alter und neuer
Zeit” in order to spread knowledge about a diverse Jewish culture,
the meaning of ceremonial objects, Hebrew prints, arts, literature,
celebrations, and customs. He sought to preserve the rich Jewish cultural
heritage and counteract disinterest in Judaism by educating the Jewish community
about their religion and heritage He commissioned numerous articles by experts
in which they introduced objects from the “Israelitisches
Familienblatt Collection” and other private and museum
collections. Today these articles illustrated with numerous photos constitute an
important source since most ritual objects have been lost or destroyed. The
prizes described in this article, reaching from a trip to Palestine to ritual
objects, are evidence of an attempt to address a broad audience without
identifying with a particular political or intellectual movement, potentially
including secular Zionists as
well as Orthodox Jews.

The end of the Israelitisches
Familienblatt

In 1935
Leo I. Lessmann sold
his publishing house and printing business at conditions dictated by the
National Socialists and prepared for his move to Berlin and eventually
his emigration. In the spring of 1939 he and his family
managed to emigrate from Amsterdam to Palestine. His
collection was packed up and remained in Amsterdam, where it was
confiscated by the Gestapo in 1943. It is considered lost.
In Tel Aviv,
Lessman earned a
living by working for the German-language newspaper Blumenthals Neueste Nachrichten [“Blumenthal’s Latest News”]. He
died in Tel Aviv
in 1970.

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About the Author

Helga Krohn, Dr. phil., publications on the history of the Jews in Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. Until 2004 research assistant at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.